8 Weeks Before Her Son's Due Date, She Had an Abortion

'Elizabeth' recounts her experience in an interview with Jezebel
By Kate Seamons,  Newser Staff
Posted Jun 16, 2016 5:16 PM CDT
Updated Jun 19, 2016 9:47 AM CDT
8 Weeks Before Her Son's Due Date, She Had an Abortion
"What I came to accept was the fact that I would never get to be this little guy’s mother—that if we came to term, he would likely live a very short time until he choked and died. This was a no-go."   (Shutterstock)

Throughout "Elizabeth's" pregnancy—her second after first miscarrying at 10 weeks last September—the 35-year-old largely kept the news quiet, telling good friends "it's really dicey." As the Brooklyn woman explains to Jia Tolentino in a raw interview with Jezebel about having an abortion at 32 weeks, she experienced a cascade of less-than-optimal news as the weeks ticked on: Her doctor discovered her uterus was oddly shaped; an umbilical cord issue interfered with blood flow; a scan revealed clubbed feet. The problems weren't related, she tells Tolentino. "They're all random and rare, and on their own, they're manageable." The fetus—she was expecting a son—kept growing, and Elizabeth and her husband tried to keep hope alive. But at roughly 31 weeks, a scan showed the growth had cratered and the couple learned something was "deeply, deeply wrong."

If the baby did survive birth, "he would likely live a very short time until he choked and died," she explains. Presented by her doctors with the option to "minimize his pain as much as possible," Elizabeth opted to have an abortion, performed by one of just four doctors in the country who do such late-term procedures (legally, Tolentino points out). She recounts her travels to Colorado, where she paid $10,000 to have a drug injected into the fetus that stopped its heart before flying back to NYC to have labor induced; she details the horrific delivery that followed. Her interview with Tolentino occurred two weeks later, and she shares her emotional "doom and gloom," her anger that we can't have "an honest conversation" about abortion, and her hopes of getting pregnant again. Read her story here. (Jezebel previously spoke to a mom with a failed IUD who chose abortion.)

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